Indian superhero role call

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No film industry that lays claim to colourful escapism the way India's does can do so without putting forward its fair share of ridiculously garbed costumed heroes, says Todd Stadtman

SUPERMAN

It's no surprise that Superman is beloved in India. After all, his supernatural abilities so resemble those of the heroes of Hindu religious epics - such as the awesome Hanuman - who, through appearances in everything from movies to comic books, have also become fixtures of Indian popular culture. As far as I know, India's first screen adaptations of the Man of Steel were a pair of low-budget productions released in 1960, both of which starred the actor Jairaj in the title role despite being the products of completely different outfits. One of these was Mohammed Hussain's pragmatically titled Superman, while the other, directed by Manmohan Sabir, bore the more puzzling moniker Return of Mr. Superman, a direct result of pressure put upon Sabir by the producer of Hussain's competing version. Return of Mr. Superman'sinterpretation of its titular hero (that's Mr. Superman to you) stays well shy of honing too closely to the original source material. Far less liability-averse were a couple of adaptations that came along during the '80s. These included the 1980 Telugu language version that is often referred to as "Telugu Superman" , and 1987's notorious "Hindi Superman" , which went so far as to swipe actual special effects footage from Richard Donner's mega-budget Superman, The Motion Picture.

GURU 1980

Though basically a remake of Dharmendra's 1973 thriller Jugnu, this Tamil language film sought to set itself apart via the inclusion of the pictured pink-garbed caped crusader, who shows up in one scene to dazzle a slack-mouthed gang of hoods with his acrobatic skills before disappearing from the picture altogether. Mission accomplished, Guru.

SHIVA KA INSAAF 1985

The mid 1980s saw something of a mini-boomlet in Indian superhero films, with Shiva Ka Insaaf standing out as something of an early adopter. Shiva Ka Insaaf was also India's second 3D film, and it's first in Hindi. Star Jackie Shroff appeals to the god Shiva for super powers and gets them, along with a somewhat ill-fitting leather costume. Other than the religious overtones, this is another pretty straightforward retelling of the Superman story, complete with Jackie taking the guise of a socially-challenged reporter and Poonam Dhillon taking on the role of a serially-imperiled Lois Lane figure. Given the 3D process involved, it will surprise no one that Jackie's super powers mostly involve throwing things directly into the camera.

SHAHENSHAH 1988

The road back to superstardom after his ill-advised detour into politics was a hard one for Amitabh Bachchan. Perhaps hoping to piggy-back on the success of the aforementioned Mr India, his rapid-fire spate of late '80s comeback vehicles included not one, but two costumed hero capers. The first of these was the moderately well-received Shahenshah, in which Bacchan played a Batman-style masked vigilante.

DARA SINGH

It's impossible for me to compose a list like this without mentioning beloved wrestler-turned-stunt-film-king Dara Singh, who passed away on Thursday. Although I don't know of Dara ever starring in what could be described as a traditional superhero film, the man was something of a superhero in his own right, and, in keeping with that, many of his films have a fittingly comic book-ish feel. Included in these are pictures in which he played everything from Tarzan, to Flash Gordon-style space jockeys, to Zorro-like masked riders, all of which guarantee that, mask or no, his are films that provide all the breezy, cheesy thrills that any superhero movie fan could ask for.

AJOOBA 1991

And rounding out Amitabh's trilogy of cinematic superheroism is this odd Russo-Indian co- production, in which the Big B plays a righteous masked rider. But what you'll really want to see this movie for are all of the bizarre creatures and weird special effects, which are plentiful. The happy ending to all of this, of course, is that Bachchan did eventually regain his foothold on superstardom and has not looked back since. Since then, he has refrained from playing any superheroes, but he has played the Progeria-stricken child of his own actual son, so I'll let you be the judge of whether that's a change for the better or not.

KRRISH 2006

Either I've missed out on some Indian superhero movies from the 1990s, or audiences of that era were having a hard enough time dealing with Karisma Kapoor's outfits without also having to confront the spectacle of grown men in day-glo tights. In any case, in the noughties the superhero returned to India's theater screens in big budget style with this loose sequel to 2003's Koi… Mil Gaya. Heartthrob Hrithik Roshan plays Krishna, the inheritor of super powers that were in turn given to his father by an E.T. Graced with enough state-of-the-art CG effects and wire assisted stunts to make it almost indistinguishable from a crap Hollywood film, Krrish met with enough favourable audience response to merit a sequel.

RA.ONE 2011

It seems a bit surprising that SRK would have waited so long to jump into the superhero game, but let it not be said that, once he did, he didn't do it in ostentatious style. Ra.One literally uses all of the special effects ever to tell it's tale of a timid video game designer reincarnated as one of his own creations with an assortment of apparently Tron-based super powers. And if the tech-heavy result perhaps lacked some of the heart of some of the more humble entries listed above, it was at least suited to compete on the global superhero blockbuster stage in terms of volume, velocity and violence.

Stadtman is a San Francisco-based writer who blogs at diedangerdiediekill. blogspot. com